Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Work has been a real drag lately, and I’ve also been doing some geeky stuff in my free time. The end result is that I’m too tired to blog. Instead, I’ll point you to the two TOS stories I read and voted for in the ASC Awards lately: Weeds by Rabble Rouser and the sequel Not All At Once by Djinn. They’re about Marla from the TOS episode “Space Seed,” with a little of The Wrath of Khan thrown in. If all TOS fic were about Khan, I’d have a new fandom on my hands. Fortunately, it takes only a paragraph or two of any fic involving Christine Chapel to send me running back to the Delta Quadrant.

I don’t usually read warbloggers, or political blogs more generally. For one thing, they’re more likely to use Blogger, while the geek blogs all have RSS feeds. Blog technology, or lack of it, affects my blog reading more than I ever thought it would when I innocently downloaded NetNewsWire Lite. I’m far, far more likely to read content that’s fully syndicated, like mine, Perversion Tracker’s, and Phil Ringnalda’s, because it shows up right there in NetNewsWire. Next come the blogs that syndicate a summary like Mac OS X Hints - most of the Mac news sites and MovableType blogs do at least that much. The third tier of blogs are those that only syndicate titles, a category which would hardly exist without the half-baked efforts of LiveJournal at providing RSS feeds.

RSS works at the entry level rather than the page level. I don’t right-arrow on nearly as many LJ entries as I used to read before RSS changed my life. I hardly read geek blogs before NetNewsWire, and now I follow a bunch of them. It’s a victory of content over socializing; content won because it costs me fewer click-taxes. Blog content tends to be freestanding and longer, while LJ entries are shorter and more enmeshed in the whole LJ tangle of threads, rumors, memes and wanks. So I get more content per click from blogs.

If Blogger supported RSS, I’d be keeping up better with Lori, who is TNG, and Mike, who’s into politics. Blogger is the only major blogging tool left without free support for some sort of aggregation. I don’t think it’s a wise policy to charge for RSS feeds since it’s not the user who is inconvenienced by their absence - it’s the reader. There’s no direct incentive for Mike to pay money because I want a feed, yet Blogger looks bad for not supporting technology everyone else gives away for free.

Bad Blogger! Get your new sugar daddy to spring for free feeds.

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and
meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger). […] According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” –The Skeptic’s Dictionary

Fiction is the art of apophenia, especially fanfiction when it makes meaningful connections the original producers neither saw nor dreamt of. The habit isn’t restricted to slash, either - non-canonical or semi-canonical pairings of all sorts arise from the fan’s spontaneous perception. Putting together a plot means making connections that don’t tend to hold in reality - from little actions that fit the theme to it all coming together on the last page.

Some people don’t restrict their apophenia to fiction - Immanuel Velikovsky made bad science out of what would have been a marvelous sci-fi premise in Worlds in Collision. Related phenomena listed in the Dictionary include Jung’s notion of synchronicity or “meaningful coincidences,” which seem to result from ESP or a sort of low-grade miracle, and pareidolia, the bad habit of seeing faces in potato chips and the Cydonia region of Mars.

I found the Skeptic’s Dictionary while looking up something else entirely, but the pseudoscience was interesting enough to keep me reading through many entries. I found that when the Skeptic was arguing against independent, falsifiable scientific data (as in I.Q. and Race or the Bible Code), he beat around the bush without ever disproving anything. Even in cases where his arguments sounded good (multiple personality disorder and the related hypnotism), a little more data would have been nice.

He chalks up the MBTI to the Forer effect (also known as the Barnum effect), the same force that makes your astrological sign seem to predict your personality. That’s from the typee’s end, though - the assessor might still be making a psychometric survey yielding a statistical correlation with people’s skills or career choices. An article linked on the page claims otherwise - Measuring the MBTI and Coming Up Short by David J. Pittenger, in the Journal of Career Planning & Placement Fall 1993. Pittenger cites evidence that S/N and J/P are correlated with one another, though he doesn’t say how.

Although the Skeptic attributes the power of the Forer effect to wishful thinking, it sounds like more apophenia to me. Conspiracy theories would also be a kind of apophenia - the persistent belief that the world is more ordered than it, in fact, is.

Skeptical link of the day: multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder)

I read Analog on the T, where my standards are lower. I even enjoyed Catherine Asaro’s story “Walk in Silence” in the latest issue (April 2003), despite two, count ‘em, two occurrences of “gentle” as an intransitive verb. In general, it shares the strengths and weaknesses of The Last Hawk, Catch the Lightning, and, I can only assume, her other novels: a good plot with weak characterization and a side of wholly unconvincing romance.

At the other end of Analog was part three of “Shootout at the Nokai Corral,” a serial that’s holding my attention over the months despite a very silly setting and intentionally stereotypical characters. “A Deadly Medley of Smedley” doesn’t overcome its silliness nearly as well, and I found “Emma” and “Coming of Age” technically deficient for reasons it probably isn’t worth going into.

On the other hand, Bellwether by Connie Willis was so technically proficient that there’s little I can say about it but go thou and read likewise. It’s a fine example of a subgenre I otherwise wouldn’t have thought existed - sci-fi set in the present time. Usually such books are thrillers about secret corporate conspiracies or, more rarely, secret Amish conspiracies. Bellwether is about scientists working for a think tank, struggling with the inanity of Management Acronyms and the incompetence of their office help. At stake is both pure knowledge and grant money, and the plot is baroque and surprising as usual.

Link to high orbit: The Space Elevator by the folks at HighLift Systems

Today was a good day for surfing the Big Blogs, with the help of my trusty assistant NetNewsWire. The Weird Facts were legion. For example, scientists have decided that Mars has a molten iron core just like Earth and Venus. An extrovert chimes in on the extrovert/introvert divide.

When the science links run out, I turn to mac news. People rarely say they like PC’s better than Macs, but they frequently claim PC’s are cheaper than Macs. Here’s why that isn’t so. My favorite quote: The average Wintel home user spends over 50 hours each year troubleshooting their computer. The average Mac user spends less than 5.

Fifty hours is enough time to do NaNoEdMo, for example. In fact, I find that the average Windows user spends more time complaining to me about their computer troubles per year than I spend troubleshooting my Mac, even though they know they’ll be mocked for it.

Last but not least, TOS and ENT voting are going on now in the ASC Awards, and AAA is also open for J/C business.

Geek humor: a picture of an end tag

Well, if extensive work on my encyclopedia counts, then I’ve been keeping up with NaNoEdMo and then some. Otherwise, I’m four hours behind schedule already.

The lastest addition to my XML encyclopedia is hyperlinks - or in this case, just cross-references between my entries. I was making them directly with XLink, but that was too much typing so I switched to a method of turning plain text into links using JavaScript. I found it in an article on the Apple developers’ site: XML Transformations with CSS and DOM. It took a bit of time to get them working - trying to loop through the different kinds of cross-references led to many mysterious parsing errors in Chimera (uh, Camino), so I switched to one big loop that covered all crosslink cases. Now when I click on a crosslink, it takes me directly to the appropriate entry, and I only had to type “href” once (in the JavaScript file).

Now if only XML could do my dishes, too…

Mac link of the day: Browsers in the Hands of an Angry God - it’s offensive and silly and despite it all, hilarious.

If you don’t follow all the browser technobabble or if you need a bigger push to convert to the One True Browser, take a look at this article on how one blogger switched to Mozilla. He mentioned an old article, A Standard for Site Organization, which was a nice idea but doesn’t seem to have caught on. I surfed around the latter site, and found this amusing prediction from 1999 that “inside of a year” the blogging fad would have run its course. I preferred a newer theory I spotted in my blog rounds but can’t track down now: blogs will eventually replace the Usenet newsgroups.

MacOS X link of the day: iTerm, a cross between Chimera (sorry, Camino) and the Terminal app

I’ve seen this bit of writing advices a few times recently: one should not call it a tragic death because all death is tragic. The phrase is, presumably, redundant. Of course I disagree.

First of all, it’s a misuse of the word tragic. Tragedy refers to the fall of great men through a tragic flaw or an unstoppable force, or calamities more generally. The death of a 90-year-old man in his sleep can hardly be described as tragic. If a policeman guns down an escaping axe-murderer, perhaps the angels weep but we don’t.

Perhaps death is always sad, but it isn’t always unexpected enough to make it tragic. Sometimes it’s simply unfortunate. I don’t think of the Columbia accident as a tragedy - though it could turn out to be an instance of culpable negligence, it hasn’t yet. Someone who was against the space program in general might consider it proof of NASA’s hubris - a traditional tragic flaw - but I’m not against the space program.

NASA and its astronauts take a calculated risk. No one is forced into the profession by any means - they want to be up there despite the danger. The disaster, if there is one, is in the consequences. None of the Columbia’s crew would have wanted their deaths to bring a halt to the ISS program. They would have wanted us to go right back up there, even though sometimes the atmosphere wins.

I’m not taking NaNoEdMo as seriously as I took NaNoWriMo. There’s some debate over in the NaNoEdMo forums, about what exactly counts towards your fifty hours of editing. The strict interpretation says you should have pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, during your whole fifty hours. My interpretation includes random daydreaming about my story, or rereading it in the tub. (That’s how I consumed today’s 2 hours of editing.)

If I were being serious about it, I would have planned ahead according to the tips. I would be writing 50,000 more words to add to the current 50,000 and make my novel commercially viable, besides brushing up the scenes that are there. Instead I’m doing things vaguely related to the novel, like converting the encyclopedia I keep for my universe into XML.

I’m enjoying the rereading more than I expected. The novel gets a little rough at the end, when the deadline was pressing, but overall it’s better than I expected. It needs some subplot filler (as opposed to padding, which is bad filler) - not just to fill out the word count but to flesh out the main character, who’s really growing on me. He may be a homicidal maniac, but he’s my homicidal maniac.

During the other 22 hours of the day, I’ve been working on my encyclopedia. I wrote an XML DTD for it, as well as a CSS stylesheet for the XML. It’s gorgeous, if I do say so myself. I looked around for some cool fonts - the only one I downloaded was KelmscottRoman, but the sites were fun just to look through: Nick’s Fonts and apostrophic laboratories.

I used to keep all my info for my original stories in a TWiki running on my mac’s local webserver, but I found that too cumbersome to use. I prefer editing in emacs instead of browser windows, for one thing, and I wanted more control over the display of my encyclopedia. XML and CSS did enough for me, though it’s clunky in some ways.

The Encyclopedia DTD and stylesheet are available upon request. My email address is around here somewhere…

I’d heard of the Horatio Hornblower novels (by C. S. Forester, author of The African Queen) mainly as an influence upon the military sci-fi coming-of-age genre. I certainly saw Honor Harrington in old Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Back when I read the other H.H., I expressed a hope that 2D naval battles would be easier to follow than Weber’s space battles. In that I was disappointed - I was lost many times, not only in battle, and my ignorance of sailing ships accounts for only a part of my confusion. The characterization wasn’t quite what I might have hoped, but I don’t mind a stock, reticent, long-suffering hero now and again. By the way, there’s Horatio Hornblower fanfic out there, if you’re interested.

I can’t stop rubbernecking at anthologies. I’m always disappointed with them, but when I see one lying around the new books table in the library, I think, maybe this one will be different. Impossible Things, covering about ten years of Alan Dean Foster in short stories, wasn’t any different. Many of the stories were written for other anthologies - never a good sign. None of the stories were actually bad, though - he’s a competent writer. Several were trick stories where the end reveals that the story was not about what you thought. Having more than one such in the collection detracted from their effect.

The spine reads Del Rey Science Fiction, but out of nineteen stories, perhaps three were science fiction proper. If you consider medical thrillers, superheroes, and alien abduction stories sci-fi, then a few more could be included. The majority, though were fantasy, or more accurately, magical realism (unless you define magical realism to be fantasy written by someone with a Spanish surname). Now, I like magical realism, but it’s not science fiction. I think Alan Dean Foster is better at writing magical realism than sci-fi. I’d have been more likely to pick up the book had it advertised itself as such, rather than as sci-fi by a sci-fi writer I’ve never heard anything good (or for that matter, bad) about. I particularly liked “Laying Veneer,” an Australian outback story which I’d read before elsewhere, and the trick stories. I can’t tell you which ones they were; that would spoil the trick.

Another anthology I couldn’t leave well enough alone was the latest Writers of the Future volume. Though it had a higher proportion of sci-fi, the fantasy was better. There was more sex than the contest rule against it would have led me to expect, but it wasn’t particularly explicit. The nonfiction articles were not as helpful as the ones in the last volume I read. My favorite stories were “Graveyard Tea” and “The Road to Levenshir,” which were both first-place winners for their quarters. The former was magical realism and the latter fantasy in a more standard medieval mode.

So, to define my terms: Science fiction is fiction set in the future or an reality which depends on science or technology for major plot points, or at least for the setting, or at the very least to explain the setting. Fantasy is fiction set in the past or an reality which depends on magic or medievalism for major plot points, or at least for the setting. Magical realism is fiction set in the present which involves magic or the vaguely supernatural. Anything else probably falls into a non-sf/f genre or subgenre: medical thrillers, spy thrillers, horror, disaster, comic books, etc.